Again another blog post that was requested by you the blogshere. As you all know the main OneNote file type is .one which is an individual section file and it lives, as all files in, in a directory/folder. You can open up folders as notebooks in OneNote and any subfolders will be Section Groups in OneNote. However there are a few other OneNote files that are important and in most cases you will never see, but if you are reading this blog then you like to learn about stuff so let me share with you all.

OneNote Single File Package - .onepkg

OneNote Packages are like zip files that allow you to share OneNote files across computers including all of the embedded files that were in those sections/files. Additionally you can send entire notebooks which you couldn't do before in OneNote 2003. If you are in OneNote and want to send an entire notebook to someone you can choose File-->Save as and select to save the entire notebook as a .onepkg see here:

Then you can send that file as an attachment and the recipient can open that file directly and it will take them to OneNote and show them the entire notebook. It is a great way to share files with people and you can't use a shared notebook. It is also a great way to archive all of your files. In reality this is just a CAB file so you can open the file yourself. Note: in earlier builds of OneNote 2007, like Beta1, these were called OneNote Archives and were .onea files (just in case anyone ever googles for ".onea" I wanted to have this out in the world somewhere)

OneNote Table of Contents - .onetoc & .onetoc2

Another file type most people have never seen before are the OneNote TOC files. These files are system files by default so unless you have told Windows to show them you probably haven't seen them. These files contain the ordering of sections within a notebook. The .onetoc was for OneNote 2003 and contain information about which files are open/closed and in what order the sections appear. In OneNote 2007 we have .onetoc2 files which has information about ordering of sections. If you delete this file then OneNote will open the notebook in alphabetical order and then you can reorder them yourself.

I wanted to pass on the following information from Olya Veselova who is another PM on the OneNote team. She owns some of our most favourite features such as: Outlook task sync, hyperlinks and search! She wanted me to share the following information about OneNote search:

Then simply follow OneNote prompts to download the newer version of Windows Desktop Search indexing component.

OneNote will find your notes even if they have not been indexed yet, because it always scans directly through any non-indexed items. So your search speed will vary depending on how many of your notes have been indexed.

Then try the "How to fix search" instructions below, but please log a bug even if your issue was fixed.

What information to include with the bug:

Please include as much of this information as possible. The more you provide, the easier it is for us to fix the problem.

Do you have Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2?

How long ago did you install WDS?

Were you prompted by OneNote or Outlook to install it? (If by Outlook, was OneNote already installed at the time?)

Did you have previous versions of WDS on your computer before?

If yes, did you do an uninstall of the previous WDS version, or did you just upgrade by running the new installer?

Did you restart OneNote after installing WDS?

Did you restart your computer ever since installing WDS?

Did you see any OneNote error/warning dialogs related to WDS?

What is the indexer status?

Start > Programs > Windows Desktop Search > click the dropdown icon on the right-hand side next to the help icon > Desktop Search Options. Include a screenshot of the Indexing Options dialog that comes up.

If you search for tt, how many pages does OneNote find? (these are any pages containing timestamp under the title). Was the search very quick?

For any pages that search for tt did not find - can you find other words from these pages? (Before searching for the word, please navigate away from the page, because OneNote will always search the current page regardless)

More advanced:

Is OneNote using the indexer? Here is how to find out:

Turn on Indexer Info task pane by doing this: Paste the text below into Notepad, save the file, and then rename the .txt to .reg. Double-click the .reg file. This sets registry keys that enable OneNote search logging. Restart OneNote.

In Indexer Info pane click Quick Verify Index. This will take some time. When it completes, how many pages are listed in the yellow find control that comes up - this is the number of non-indexed pages.

Is OneNote still finding hits in these pages (as it is supposed to)?

Use the yellow control to jump to one of these pages. Look for some word or phrase on the page. Then navigate away from the page- now search for that word and see if that page will be in the list of results. Please report to us if it is not.

I love this team & I love OneNote! This morning I was sitting in my office doing some work and my coworker said, "Are you listening to that song too?" "No I said," and then he told me that our test manager, Mike Tholfsen, had send out a song he wrote for OneNote and it was sitting in my inbox. I just couldn't believe it, I know that Mike had a guitar in his office and he claimed he made a song about Outlook, but this was just too cool. I listened to the song and then a bunch of other people came into my office and we were all listening to it. I have to admit I was even humming it throughout the day, I really enjoy it.

This was just too cool not to share it with you all, so without further ado, I present: My One and Only OneNote(mp3, 3.37megs)

My One and Only OneNote

Let me tell you 'bout my favorite applicationA software notebook for the modern ageOne place for all of your notesPut any type of content on the digital page

A flexible tool that works the way you doOrganize your stuff how you want toBrainstorms or meeting notes or doing web researchCapture, find, share and re-use

No other software can make me feel this way

My one and only OneNoteMy one and only OneNoteMy one and only OneNoteIt's the one for me

Use a shared notebook for group collaboration Or start a live sharing session with your friendsLike a rich wiki with merge and replicationEveryone's in sync when the meeting ends

Mike, our Test Manager and singer/songwriter for My One and Only OneNote, sends us a round-up of the OneNote blogs and I just copy and paste them here to my blog and then I read them. This is the most recent round-up:

How embedded files now work in OneNote B2TR (and will in RTM)

I see there have been some interesting threads on embedded files, and apologize for my absence in responding to them. Rather than replying on what became a very deep thread, I thought I'd start a new one with a clear explanation of how things work.

1. As of B2TR "inserted files" (aka embedded files) are actually stored within the .one section files. That is, when you insert a file on a page in OneNote, it gets stored in the relevant section file in your notebook folders. You no longer will see "thicket" folders (xx_onfiles) alongside the seciton file, they are not used anymore.

2. We made this change for a number of reasons, but mainly because lots of other replication systems underneath us (e.g. Windows Offline Files caching, Folder Share, Groove, other sync tools you might use) could do some pretty nasty things to us when they are moving/copying/renaming the section files separately from the embedded files in the folder. That might even result in loss of those files for the user. That would be bad, we take data integrity very seriously so we decided to be more robust when co-existing with these tools. Second, users could get themselves in a mess (e.g. move the .one section files but not the thicket folder with it etc.). That would also be bad, could result in data loss etc.

3. There is an exception to the above change. When we are syncing to a notebook on SharePoint we still leave the embedded files in separate "thicket" folders alongside the section file. This is for performance reasons because we have to send whole files on SharePoint when making updates, we can't just selectively update some bits within the file. So big files are expensive. Also, the sync/replication systems mentioned above (Windows Offline Files, Folder Share, Groove etc.) don't generally operate on SharePoint document libraries, so that problem doesn't exist there.

4. So the definitive repository of your embedded files is in the .one section files along with your notebooks. Just like all notebook data, we do replicate them down to our cache for a whole bunch of reasons discussed in earlier threads (performance, offline availability, etc.). In our cache, for performance reasons we store them as separate files still (the way we store things in our cache vs user files is completely separable and we have different performance / architecture considerations for each). This in no way means that this is the only or definitive place where these files are stored (i.e. it's just a cached copy for our operational needs).

5. Our cache is a "garbage collected" store. In simple terms, this means that when you delete something or close a notebook, it won't disappear from there immediately. When we've accumulated a certain % of no longer in use stuff, and the machine is not busy we come along later and clean things up, remove things that are no longer referenced etc. You can always force this operation at anytime by choosing the "Optimize All Files Now" button in the Tools->Options->Save tab. You will note when you do this that it can take some time, that's why we don't do these operations immediately everytime you delete/close something. The garbage collected store results in much better performance for the user.

6. I STRONGLY recommend you ignore the cache folder in the system "Local Settings" directory and certainly don't go messing with it and messing around with files in there. That's probably not going to lead to a happy result for you. If your notebooks are fully in sync and you're a super power user, and you want to rebuild the cache, yes that can be done (basically delete ALL the files there including the .onecache file itself, I wouldn't mess with them individually). This may have been helpful in earlier beta builds when we still had sync issues. At B2TR and RTM though I really can't think of a good reason at all to recommend you do this.

7. One very unfortunate limitation of what we could with embedded files in this version is that our search will not produce hits within the embedded files. I won't go into all the technical details and issues dealing with indexing engines etc., but I will say this pains us greatly, it's somethign we really wanted to do, we thought long and hard about it, but we just couldn't do that work in this release. It's a lot of work to do right and we focused most of our search energy on just getting fast indexed search for OneNote content right.

8. Audio and video recordings made with OneNote are treated just like other embedded files. All the same issues, challenges etc. apply so we handle them in the same way.

Pretty much I am writing this for someone as a proof of concept and I thought I would share it with all of you J. You know how you can create Outlook tasks directly from OneNote and they appear in Outlook? They look like this:

And it appears in my Todo Bar in Outlook and I can check of an item and it appears in OneNote as done. The two-way task sync was one of our most popular feature requests from OneNote 2003 SP1. Now some questions are:

How does this work? Lets look under the hood shall we?

Can I create my own tasks that look like this in OneNote that are linked to my Outlook tasks that weren't created by OneNote.

Let's resolve both of these with this blog post.

How linked Outlook tasks work

First of all we do this feature by adding two special fields to the outlook task item, they are: OneNoteTaskID & OneNoteURL. So for the task that I just created let's see what it looks like in Outlook.

I am going to use the Developer tab on the Ribbon, to see this open an Outlook task and choose File/Office ButtonàEditor Options and turn on to view the developer tab. So when I go into the task I click on Design this Form here:

Then I choose (All Fields) and I can see this:

There are the custom fields that OneNote put on this tasks when it was created. Now what does the XML look like in OneNote? Let's see here:

Okay so now we are ready to set the fields on the Outlook item. For this experience let's say that I already had an Outlook task called "Test task in OLK" and now I just open it up and choose to change the form again, but this time instead of choosing "User-defined fields in this item" I choose "User-defined fields in folder" and I see this:

So now I just need to set the OneNoteTaskID to what I inserted earlier: {AD9B64F6-A770-4509-931B-DDB71A4F871A} and I would need to insert the hyperlink back to that item (which can be found with GetHyperlinkToObject). So let me set those properties here:

And save my tasks and then after a quick sync OneNote sees this change here:

I can check off items in OneNote and it goes to Outlook and vice-versa, just like if you had created the task directly in OneNote:

Why did I blog about this?

Imagine that you wanted to do your own GTD application which would look at your Outlook tasks and you wanted to create a summary page in OneNote, much like our tag summary page. Here is how you would do this, all programmatically of course. I just wanted to show you how it could be done. Maybe if I have more time I could code up something like this myself, who knows.

Microsoft Corp. Wednesday posted add-ons for Office 2007 that allow users to save files in the electronic paper PDF and XPS file formats, making good on a promise after it stripped the features from the suite under pressure from Adobe Systems Inc.

Per usual you can open notes created in OneNote 2007 B1, B1TR, B2 & B2TR but once you open the notes in OneNote 2007 B2TR they will be updated to the newest version of the OneNote 2007 file format. You will not be able to open B2TR files in B2, so if you are really cautious you might want to make a backup of your files before opening OneNote 2007 B2TR for the first time. I don't do this but then again I am not that cautious as some of your are and I don't store my class notes in OneNote : )

If you open for the first time since OneNote 2003 then it should take of upgrade automatically however if you ran OneNote 2007 Beta2 at any point then the first boot reg key will still be set.

"The company remains on track to complete work on the 2007 Microsoft Office system in October of this year and is planning to make the product available to the business customers through the volume licensing program in October 2006."

That being said B2TR is going to be release in mid-Sept 2006 so that means there is a quick turn around for bugs and customer issues. If you have issues with OneNote 2007 B2TR please log a bug against OneNote on our Microsoft Connect site and the sooner that you do this the better! Remember quality is the #1 priority for the team so getting feedback from you all is vitally important.

As my close friends will know I am left-handed and I am always pointing out people who are left-handed (John Stewart, Bill Clinton and Link‽). My friend Justin just sent me an article about how on the new Nintendo Wii it appears that Link changed from being left-handed to right-handed, here is the article: Miyamoto talks Zelda -- Link a lefty no more. That got me thinking about the Wiil and software in general for left-handed people. As many people know in the United States there is a law that says that all software sold to the US Government has to be accessible. Here on the OneNote team and Microsoft in general we work hard to make our software accessible, that is one thing I never learned in university that was a big change when I came to Microsoft.

I wonder how well the Wii will be for lefties? Will there be a way to switch hands, can the side controller piece work if you are using it with your right hand and your left hand is holding the main controller. I just would like to see what the experience for lefties is and if the console works well for lefties.

This leads me my first experience using OneNote on a Tablet, when using a regular computer I use it just like everyone else all of my scrollbars on the right and I hold the mouse in my right hand so I am just like the 'normal' user. When I switched my computer into Tablet mode I was holding the pen in my left hand and holding the computer in my right hand. I hated that when I tried to scroll down with the pen that I was always covering up the content of the page. Think about it with my left hand, I would reach across the screen to the scrollbar on the right to move up or down, the same thing would happen when I tried to change pages with the pen. I was upset but then I saw this setting in Tools -->Options:

<can't upload pictures right now, sorry>

See in OneNote you have the ability to switch where the page tabs and vertical scroll bar appears, either on the right (by default) or on the left. This is such a great feature for left-handed people. To be honest this was the first time I have seen any software that allows you to do this.

My next steps would be: If OneNote could get information from the Tablet about which mode the Tablet was in (typing mode or writing mode) that it would autoswitch the scroll bars and settings as you wish.

Anyone know of other software out there for left-handed people? I would love to hear about it!

For the past two years I have been involved with a program we have here @ Microsoft called College Puzzle Challenge which as the website states is:

College Puzzle Challenge is an annual puzzle-solving competition held simultaneously on college campuses across North America. Teams of 4 participants compete against their peers to solve challenging puzzles and win exciting prizes. This year, College Puzzle Challenge organizers have teamed up with the international organization, S.O.L.V.E. (Special Operations for Location, Verification and Extraction), to explore the secrets of a mysterious island.

Last year I went back to the University of Michigan, where I went to college, and helped work on the ground crew. We worked with the students, fed them, and generally had a great day working out the puzzles and showing the students a good time. I never really was into puzzles much until I came to work here. There is a huge culture of puzzle events here @ Microsoft and this even is a great way for us to show people what the culture is like here. Amazingly the same people who love to solve puzzles also like to solve problems let it be coding, DIY stuff like from Make magazine, building robots or cars, etc. We are the tinkers and problem solvers (btw compared to most people I know I suck @ puzzles, I just like to help however I can).

I just wanted to blog about this because this is one of my side projects that I work on here @ Microsoft that isn't involved with my job, consider it my 20% time or something. I have been working on the website (along with some amazing people) and here it is: http://www.collegepuzzlechallenge.com/

If you attend one of the following schools:

Columbia University

Cornell University

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stanford University

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Michigan

University of Texas at Austin

University of Toronto

University of Washington

I recommend that you find 3 other people and register your team! It will be held on Nov 11th, 2006 from 12noon ET to 12midnight ET, you get free food, free t-shirt and most importantly a chance to have a great time. See you there.

I haven't talked much about GUIDs in this blog and how they will be unique, etc. First of all almost all items in OneNote have unique IDs, otherwise we could export them and reimport them into a page unless they were unique. So here are items that have hierarchy IDs:

Notebooks

Section Groups

Sections

Pages

These items will be unique for a given OneNote session; if I have 4 notebooks open each will have a GUID that will not appear anywhere else in the hierarchy. Additionally other items have an object ID which is an ID for something on the page, here are items that have object IDs:

Outlines

Images

InkDrawings

Embedded Files

Media files

Etc.

Almost any item on the page will have something which is unique on that page, however OneNote makes no guarantees that these items will be unique across all of the notebooks/sections/pages. That is why for certain methods you need both a hierarchyID and an objectID, like:

GetHyperlinkTo where you need to specific both a high-level object and something lower on the page, if you want a hyperlink to that item on the page.

NavigateTo, much like GetHyperlinkTo this will allow you to navigate to something else and you can just go to a page and leave the objectID parameter null or you can pass in an objectID as well and that will tell OneNote to navigate to the right place (this is fixed post B2TR so you won't see this in B2TR).

One last comment about GUIDs, they are unique for an individual session in OneNote BUT they are not in the files. That means that across two computers you will have two different GUIDs and if you close a notebook and then reopen the notebook it will have a new GUID. There are some GUIDs stored in the file but what happens is OneNote takes that GUID and combines it with the GUID of your cache and that becomes the GUID for your notebook. There is some other crazy math so that they can easily look @ GUIDs and see what they are for, but the most important point here is that the GUIDs will change when you open and close a notebook.

Earlier this week I got a request to blog about a few concepts in OneNote that haven't been covered before so I thought I would write about them during my lunch break. First of all I was asked about Misplaced Sections; in an ideal world you should never see these. In fact there a large amount of app that you shouldn't see in ideal cases (conflict pages, misplaced sections, error dialogs, etc).

What are Misplaced Sections? As you know in OneNote 2007 you can sync you notebook to remote locations like a SharePoint site or a UNC/SMB file share and OneNote will sync the changes for you. In most cases we can make the changes to the master copy but imagine that your server went down or you weren't connected to the network. During this time OneNote cannot sync your notes to the master copy, instead OneNote is only working out of the cache. Now as a user if you chose to close the notebook during this time what would happen? If you have changes that haven't been sync'ed you would get a prompt telling you that if you close this notebook now then your changes cannot go into the master copy, but we will not lose your information instead we will put it in Misplaced Sections. This is what the dialog looks like:

If you click on Cancel then OneNote will not close the notebook, but if you click OK then OneNote will close the notebook. The sections with new changes will go into Misplaced Sections which appears on the bottom of your navigation bar, see here:

If you have items in Misplaced Sections you can:

Keep them around on that one computer and never delete them

Drag it into another notebook so it becomes part of your notes

Clean them up by choosing to delete individual sections that are in there or choose File-->Delete Misplaced Sections

Ideally you should never see this but in case you do then you know and knowing is half the battle.

Just click on the "Register for event" button that is on the left hand side. Then login with your Passport/Windows Live account, go through a bunch of sign-in pages and then you can view the webcast. So I just tired this with Firefox and I would recommend using IE instead. It is shame that they don't detect the browser/WMP settings correctly. Maybe it is just my computer; in either event please check this out!

It is a pretty cool site where you can easily find software and download it right there. Also right now they have a 20% discount on a bunch of software packages, please see here: 20% off 20 of the hottest game downloads. The list includes these games Oblivion, WoW, EverQuest II as well as a bunch more. If you were thinking about getting these games you should do so now with a 20% discount!

Now if you search for OneNote on Windows Marketplace you only see a few items (only one addin download), I would love to see you all fix this by making software that works up there. Make a OneNote Mobile sync with Palm or a Send to OneNote from Lotus Notes, there are plenty of ideas.

Well it appears that another PM on the OneNote team has begun blogging: Olya Veselova. She says her blog will be about:

I will try to cover various OneNote how-tos, best practices, and troubleshooters that fall under the general category of "not-obvious-how-to-do-and-I-bet-some-people-are-wondering." So apologies in advance for the apparent lack of theme :).